Results for "Clarinet"

Sandor Benko

Born: August 25, 1940

Formed in 1957, the Benkó Dixieland Band is one of most popular jazz groups in Hungary while also one of the best in the world, an ensemble whose very first album was a golden disc. Winners of a great many Hungarian festivals and competitions, the BDB has been honored with numerous awards. The group has played to tens of thousands, and some of the greatest international stars were invited to play with them on stage. Over the years, the guests have included Milt Jackson, Freddie Hubbard, Al Grey, Buddy Tate, Joe Newman, Buddy Wachter, Henry Questa, Joe Muranyi, Eddy Davis, Cynthia Sayer, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Albert Nicholas, or Wild Bill Davison from the United States as well as Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, Tony Scott, Huub Janssen, Acker Bilk and many others from this side of the Atlantic. The BDB went international way back in the sixties, first touring the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany

Joe Mares

Born: August 20, 1908

Joe Mares born New Orleans 1908 was a Dixieland clarinet player, brother of Paul Mares (1900-1949), an American early dixieland jazz cornet & trumpet player, and leader of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Their father, Joseph E. Mares, played cornet with the military band at the New Orleans lakefront and ran a fur and hide business. Like many New Orleans cornetists of his generation, Joe Mares Sr.'s main influence was "King" Joe Oliver. In late 1924 Paul Mares, the brother returned to New Orleans, deciding to play music on the side while taking over the running of his family fur & hide business

Carl Barriteau

Born: February 7, 1914

Carl Barriteau was born in Trinidad, West Indies in 1914. He received his first musical tuition at the Belmont Orphanage in Trinidad and later gigged with Bert McLean's Jazz Hounds before moving to Britain in May, 1937. Twelve days later he joined Ken "Snakehips" Johnson's band to play alto sax and clarinet. The clarinet had now become his main instrument and his style became nearer to Artie Shaw than Benny Goodman. He worked with Johnson until the air raid at the Café de Paris in March, 1941 that killed the leader and seriously injured Barriteau with a broken wrist. Later in 1941, Barriteau reformed Johnson's band for a handful of Jazz Jamboree concerts and some BBC dates before forming his own band at the Cotton Club

Bob Wilber

Born: March 15, 1928

Robert Sage Wilber, clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, arranger, and educator, was born in New York City on March 15, 1928. He grew up in a musical household and recalls being fascinated with Ellington's recording of "Mood Indigo" at the age of three. In 1935, Wilber moved to Scarsdale, NY and at 13 he began formal clarinet study. He started playing jazz in high school and often visited New York City's 52nd Street absorbing the music of traditional jazzmen such as Pee Wee Russell, Sidney Bechet, Muggsy Spanier, and modern jazzmen Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker. Early on, he dedicated his life to jazz at the expense of formal college studies. Wilber studied with Sidney Bechet in 1946, living with him for several months and sitting in with him occasionally at Jimmy Ryan's

Perry Robinson

Born: August 17, 1938

Perry Morris Robinson (born September 17, 1938) is an American free jazz and klezmer clarinettist, an author, and the son of composer and folk singer Earl Robinson. Robinson was born in New York City. After college he went to the Lenox School of Music in 1959. He did some of his early work with Henry Grimes on his first record, Funk Dumpling (with Grimes, Paul Motian and Kenny Barron), and Grimes' The Call (an association revived since Grimes's re-emergence). His uniquely effervescent tone is the result of his unusual double embouchure. Since 1973 he has been working with Jeanne Lee and Gunter Hampel's Galaxy Dream Band

Ken Peplowski

Born: May 23, 1959

“When you grow up in Cleveland, Ohio, playing in a Polish polka band, you learn to think fast on your feet”, says Ken Peplowski, who played his first pro engagement when he was still in elementary school. “From my first time performing in public, I knew I wanted to play music for a living.”

Ken, and his trumpet-playing brother Ted, made many local radio and TV appearances and played for Polish dances and weddings virtually every weekend all through high-school. “That’s where I learned to improvise, ‘fake’ songs, learn about chord changes, etc.- it’s exactly like learning to swim by being thrown into the water!”

Jimmie Noone

Born: April 23, 1895

Jimmie Noone is considered one of the best clarinetists of the Roaring Twenties. His style differs from the other two great New Orleans clarinet players, Johnny Dodds and Sidney Bechet because of his smoother, more romantic tone. Noone's style was a major influence on the Swing music of the Thirties and Forties. Growing up in New Orleans Jimmie took clarinet lessons from Lorenzo Tio Jr. and Sidney Bechet (Bechet was 13 years old at the time). Noone went on to play with Freddie Keppard in the Olympia Band. In 1917 he followed Freddie to Chicago to join Keppard's Original Creole Orchestra

Phil Nimmons

Born: June 3, 1923

Paulo Moura

Born: February 15, 1929

One of Brazil's best proponents and keepers of the gafieira tradition (popular ballrooms historically linked to the Carioca folklore tradition of highly artistic and swinging dancing and playing) and one of the best choro players, Paulo Moura is an internationally awarded musician whose high standards make it easy for him to cross boundaries between classical and popular music, both performing and arranging in small ensembles or large symphonic orchestras. As a conductor, orchestrator, and arranger for famous Brazilian singers, he includes in his resumé works for Elis Regina, Fagner, Taiguara, Milton Nascimento, and Marisa Monte

Mezz Mezzrow

Born: November 9, 1899

Mezz Mezzrow was born in Chicago in 1899 and was one of that city's most popular clarinetists during the golden jazz age of the twenties. Many of Mezzrow's records reveal his deep feeling for the blues and his playing is characterized by well-thought lines, frequent agility and an appealingly acid tone, but despite touring regularly with various bands and with Louis Armstrong, his most notable contribution to jazz history is his autobiography, Really the Blues, written with Bernard Wolfe, first published in 1946. It is its unbounded vitality that so captures the revolution which jazz represented to the youth of Chicago in the twenties, and even more that of Harlem in the thirties and forties. He learned to play the saxophone in the Potomac Reformatory School where he was sentenced at the age of 16 for car theft